A Commentary on Thucydides: Books 5.25-8.109

`This volume completes Simon Hornblower's most excellent commentary on Thucydides...A rich and learned final volume, stamped with an authority that is yet open to different points of view and approaches.'---Vivienne Gray, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

`The attention to detail and the breadth of knowledge make this a unique scholarly work and a magnificent achievement...Of the utmost importance for all students of Thucydides, historiography and Greek history'.---Peter Liddel and Christy Constantakopoulou, Greece and Rome

This is the third and final volume of a historical and literary commentary on the history of the first twenty years of the twenty-seven-year `Peloponnesian War' (between the Athenians and Spartans and their respective allies) written by the great fifth-century BC historian Thucydides. The present volume of commentary covers the ten closely-narrated years 421-411 BC, and nearly half of the total of eight `books' (subdivisions) of Thucydides' work. It includes one of the most famous sections of ancient Greek literary writing, the lengthy and supremely dramatic account of the disastrous Athenian expedition against Sicily (415-413) in Books 6 and 7; but also the Melian Dialogue (in Book 5), a notorious document of Athenian imperialism; and the account of the oligarchic revolution at athens in 411 (in Book 8). All Greek is translated. There is a thematic General Introduction, and the commentary as a whole is not only a very full bibliographical guide to the copious modern literature on Thucydides in English and other languages, but offers new interpretations of many familiar passages.

Simon Hornblower was formerly Professor of Classics and Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London, and is now a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.